Search changes (hopefully improvements)

[roddy]

I'm switching (literally right now, 2.7GB and counting) the forums native search to an Amazon-hosted Elasticsearch instance. It'll take a while to update, so some stuff will be missing from search for a while. However...

 

Search for shorter terms works. like this. Or even shorter.

 

watch / watching / watched more language aware search. Although when I searched for 'quitting' it gave results for 'quite' as well, so not sure what's happening there. 

 

Search for single characters

 

Quotes for exact matches.

 

Also, we'll now be indexing all content from the beginning of the site in 2003. Previously we only went back 10 years. 

 

I have some control over the configuration. 

 

A search term in the title current scores 5 times more than in the post text.

Older content does not currently score less than newer - not sure about this, a grammar explanation doesn't become less valuable over time, information about apartment hunting might. 

Your own content appears more prominently.

Only 1,000 results are returned. That seems plenty. 

 

 

[roddy]

Indexing complete. It's now possible to find pointless topics posted a decade and a half ago by sad no-hopers who didn't even get a single reply.

 

Seems reasonably fast to me, as well. 

[roddy]

This also handles the unread / following streams in the header - shouldn't have changed them at all, but if you notice any differences...